Jared Leto says they’ll be ‘bringing the world inside our process’ in an ‘intimate’ broadcast on Friday.

By James Montgomery

30 Seconds to Mars

Photo: Ian Gavan/ Getty Images

For most of 2011 — when they weren’t setting Guinness World Records or winning MTV awards — 30 Seconds To Mars repeatedly ducked questions about their future, getting glib when asked about reports that they were calling it quits.

Of course, much to the relief of the Echelon, on Tuesday, the band put any and all speculation of a split to rest, announcing that they had begun workon the follow-up to their This Is War album … which sort of raises the question: Was 30 STM just messing with us all along? Well, no. Turns out, they were about as unsure of their future as anyone else, as Jared Leto explained to MTV News.

“We weren’t playing coy; we were on the road for two years, four months or so, and people started to ask us about a new album, and we didn’t have any plans. We didn’t know what the future was,” he explained. “We had been working for a really long time. We went from A Beautiful Lie right into the studio, right onto the road, I hadn’t had a significant break in years. So, at that point, I don’t think we knew what was going to happen for the future, so rather than make something up, we just told the truth: We didn’t know.”

That uncertainty began to change as soon as the band finally took time to decompress following their record-setting world tour. Leto — who admitted he’s “always writing songs … it’s basically become a habit at this point” — took a glance at his notebooks and realized that he was feeling recharged and excited about the possibilities a new album would present. Though, before the band started work on the new album, they had to make one thing clear: This time around, they’d try very hard to not try very hard.